A poem of about 1100 A.D. describes how the people of Leinster, by their tribes and families, celebrated their fair of Carman—Carman reputed to have come “from delightful Athens westward.” Every third year they held the feast and two years for the preparation. The kings sat in order in their Forud (a word cognate with _Forum_), surrounded by their councillors and retinue. “Each one sits in his lawful place, so that all attend to them to listen.” The women were seated in the same manner, “a noble, most delightful host, women whose fame is not small abroad.” There was a week for considering the laws and rights of the provinces for the next three years. “There aloud with boldness they proclaimed the rights of every law and the restraints.” “Annals there are verified, every division into which Erin was divided; the history of the household of Tara—not insignificant, the knowledge of every territory in Erin, the history of the women of illustrious families, of courts, prohibitions, conquests.” The accurate synchronisms of noble races, “the succession of the sovereign kings, their battles and their stern valour,” “Fenian tales of Finn, an untiring entertainment,” proverbs, maxims, royal precepts, occult poetry, topographical etymologies, the precepts of law-givers and sages—all came in their turn; and inscribed tablets, and books of trees, satires, and sharp-edged runes. While the memory of their origin, laws, and the title of every man to his land, was thus imprinted on the people’s minds, every other element of their civilization was displayed. Every day of the seven there was a show of the national sport of horse-racing. Commerce had its three markets—a market of food; a market of live stock, cows and horses; and the great market of “the foreign Greeks,” where gold and noble clothes were wont to be, carried from the branching harbours that brought hosts into the noble fair. There were trumpets and music of all sorts, and poets, exerting their utmost power till each art had its rightful meed in proper measure from the king. Professors of every sort, both the noble arts and the base arts, were there selling and exhibiting their competitions and their professional works to kings, and rewards were given for every art that was just or lawful to be sold or exhibited or listened to. The people might enjoy the rivalry of rustic buffoonery, pipes, fiddles, chainmen, bonemen, and tube players, a crowd of babbling painted masks—all in their due place. Everything was provided for—the slope of the steeds, the slope of the cooking, the slope of the embroidering women. And finally the day of solemnity, masses, adorations, and psalm singing, and the fast of all of them together; and so the assembly came to an end “without breach of law, without crime, without deed of violence, without dishonour.”